According to Penguin Random House, e-book sales of Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic” were up 356% in 2020; the ranks of Stoicism fans include Arnold Schwarzenegger, LL Cool J, Cory Booker, Brie Larson, and T-Pain.
The comedian Scott Thompson likes to listen to the “Breakfast Club” podcast while driving in Toronto. One day, during the darkest part of the lockdown, the self-help author Ryan Holiday was a guest. The episode was about Stoicism, and Thompson’s attention was piqued when he heard Holiday quote“That was it for me,” Thompson said, on a recent Zoom call. “It hit me like a shot to the heart.” He ordered the Enchiridion, Epictetus’ Stoic advice manual.
“Epictetus says you’re a fool for trying to control outcomes, that all you can control is your reaction,” Thompson said, seated before a cutout of Louise Lasser . “I’m at the point in my life where I don’t want to be jerked around by my emotions. This two-thousand-year-old philosopher, he’s exactly how I want to be.”
Thompson, who became well known in the nineteen-eighties as a member of the comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall, then as a star of “The Larry Sanders Show,” was looking for enlightenment;had shut down the writers’ room he and the other Kids had set up to write material for a reboot of their old television show, to be streamed on Amazon. Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium in the third century B.C.E., expounded upon by, and adopted by Marcus Aurelius, has been having a comeback.
Modern Stoicism might seem more suited to Joe Rogan listeners than to an iconic gay comedian. “I can’t like something that straight men like?” Thompson said, with a raised eyebrow. “I’m a classic old-fashioned liberal. This is something that’s ancient and universal.” Last winter, Thompson shot a short film with his friend Paul Bellini, a “Kids” writer who used to appear on the show in a towel, about the four basic tenets of Stoicism. “Prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance,” Thompson said. “I ordered all the stuff online: a green screen, fake snow, gallons of blood.”